


bang, he shot you

by yoonbot (iverins)



Category: VIXX
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-05
Updated: 2016-09-05
Packaged: 2018-08-13 04:10:07
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,202
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7961893
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/iverins/pseuds/yoonbot
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Taekwoon killed his first person at twenty-one.</p>
            </blockquote>





	bang, he shot you

**Author's Note:**

  * For [himuup](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=himuup).
  * Inspired by [living at the edge of the world](https://archiveofourown.org/external_works/226924) by himuup. 



> i had a lot of fun combing through your masterlist and finding a fic to remix! this doesn't hold a candle to the original, but i hope you enjoy it!
> 
>  **warnings:** brief (but recurring) descriptions of murder.

Taekwoon was not-so-secretly a sap. Hongbin said there had to be something to balance out all the times he had stared into the eyes of dead men, watching him lifelessly as he groped their still-warm bodies for their wallets and car keys. In Hongbin’s case, it was a liking for sweets – sometimes eating meals of cheap chocolate bars and fruit chews bought from gas stations across Taekwoon at twenty-four hour diners, challenging Taekwoon’s disapproving stare with his own delighted one, knowing he would win every time. 

In Taekwoon’s case, it’s – according to Hongbin – being a sap.

He’s standing outside their old high school, Taekwoon leaning against the hood of the truck, old boots digging into a particularly soppy and sparse area in the grass, reminiscing. Hongbin had suggested they hop the fence and walk around inside for a bit, but Taekwoon shook his head at the idea. 

Hongbin had frowned in response. “Suit yourself,” he said lightly, miffed, before disappearing into the shadows where the truck’s headlights could not reach. 

But Taekwoon needed a respectable amount of distance to properly remember what was, in the logical timeline of pre-murderer and post-murderer, the before. The monotony of classes. Staring out the window on the days when school had just begun, the last clutches of summer still in the sky – solid blue with the sun beating down, daring Taekwoon to stare back at it, oblivious of the teacher asking him a question relating to whatever they were supposed to be learning in class. The drone of voices swelling in between classes, a tide to get lost in.

He hadn’t really appreciated his adolescence for what it had been at the time – easy and predetermined despite all the dragging agony waiting for his birthday each year, waiting to be old enough to leave their small, redundant town – so Taekwoon found it fair to pay the occasional tribute by visiting his old high school. Which also happens to be Hongbin’s old high school, which is why he’s not standing next to Taekwoon right now, where he’s leaning against the hood of the truck.

It’s when Taekwoon’s alone, so far sunken into his thoughts, that the trepidation of what he – they, Hongbin always insisted, _they_ – does starts to tickle his skin. First like an invisible spider and its needle-thin legs splaying down his back, and then, once that figurative spider has crawled over every inch of his skin, a painful tingling rings through his body, trembling him out of his thoughts and back to the present, gasping for breath when he comes to. That’s why he started asking Hongbin to come along, but the said boy molded into the darkness twenty, maybe thirty, minutes ago, and no ripple in the night gives Taekwoon any hint of his location.

He climbs back into the truck when he feels his hands starting to shake, putting them on the steering wheel in an attempt to tether himself to something tangible, something real, while the trepidation claws at him, dragging him out of his own mind. Honks once. Twice.

Hongbin appears out of the back gate, the place where Taekwoon led him during Hongbin’s prom – three years after his own, after he had further expired and turned grey, balking at university life – the place where Taekwoon stared at him, quiet and high, blinking slowly, before Hongbin had gathered his face into his reassuring warm palms and kissed him full on the mouth. The Hongbin then had been willing to wash the blood of his first victim out of the cracks of Taekwoon’s palm, where the hand sanitizer had only smeared it into his skin. The Hongbin now Taekwoon washes the blood off of.

Also now: Hongbin slinks across the front of the truck to get to the passenger side. “So soon?” he smiles to Taekwoon as he climbs into the seat. That’s when Taekwoon thinks he notices his quivering outline against the head lights, the smile slipping from his face. 

“Hey,” Hongbin whispers, climbing over the gear shift to Taekwoon in the driver’s seat. He settles heavy into Taekwoon’s lap just as Taekwoon sucks in an earthquake of a breath. “Hey,” he says again, even quieter than the first, fingers finding their place against Taekwoon’s cheeks.

“It’s okay. We’re okay.” Gentle fingers close Taekwoon’s eyelids, cold from the midnight.

Behind them, Taekwoon sees rusted lead pipes and blood flecks and Hongbin’s torso, breathing heavy from their fucking. In his ears is the shushing lullaby Hongbin hisses against his lips, in his mouth is the taste of iron, and then it’s.

It’s okay.

 

 

 

Taekwoon killed his first person at twenty-one. Call it a sick rite of passage, an accident, an anomaly compared to his previous two decades of life. 

Hongbin was eighteen, and strangely receptive to a bloody Taekwoon showing up underneath his bedroom window in the blue hours between the heart of night and break of morning. He was also eighteen when Hongbin mouthed against his lips _let’s leave this town_ and Taekwoon wanted to give him the world. Now, at twenty-three, he gives Hongbin his desired candy bar of the week and blowjobs in danky gas station bathrooms. 

Hongbin claims it’s the world for him. But that was Hongbin – startlingly frank when he wasn’t playful, and, frankly, Hongbin didn’t give a fuck about the grand gestures that Taekwoon was raised to believe in. _This is enough,_ Hongbin whispers on his skin, to the flesh between his ribs, and Taekwoon wants so much to trust in him, this boy with bright eyes and a twisted lens to their reality. _You are enough for me._

And I. He continues when Taekwoon stays silent, either breathing hard against the headboard of a creaky motel bed or sitting in one of those beaten-up armchairs, yellowed blinds drawn closed, or beside him in the truck, smoking a cigarette. I am enough for you.

And he is.

 

 

 

Taekwoon has a nightmare that his metal bat is neon yellow and too bright in the night and his lead pipe is so rusted and crackling that it breaks apart. He misses the balding and greying head before him and hits Hongbin full force in the ear instead. His eyes fly open to the ominous chirping of birds in the darkness outside their motel window, too late to be soothing him back to sleep. 

When Taekwoon was young, he wanted none of what he has now. He thinks at ten he wanted a big house with a lot of windows and a wife and children that his parents could come over and visit. At fourteen, an acceptance to a university in the city, a way out of their stifling town. At eighteen, a boy three years younger than him with the guts to talk to him during physical education when no one else would – and that’s when his current reality and his past starts to blend together.

Taekwoon of the past needed a lot of things. Test prep classes, new soccer cleats, health insurance when he couldn’t play soccer anymore, extended periods of time people weren’t always willing to give in order for him to think things out clearly. Silence.

The Taekwoon of today asks Wonsik for a customized pistol along with his new one. Wonsik gives him a strange look, but he hands over the guns and magazines anyway, the bills Taekwoon puts on the counter between them clouding his better judgement that Taekwoon is guessing is missing a couple screws already, anyway.

“You’re really gonna let Hongbin shoot a gun,” Wonsik remarks, sucking at something stuck between his two front teeth, as Taekwoon takes turns holding each pistol in his hands, “after the way he handled a switchblade?”

Taekwoon thinks about the puckered scar, still dark against the otherwise pale skin of Hongbin’s palm. How he often presses that scar to his lips, whispering _I’m sorry, I should’ve been sooner,_ while Hongbin looks frighteningly calm just like he did when Taekwoon’s head pounded with the fear that he’d bleed out, clamoring to put pressure against the wound, and crushes Taekwoon’s head against his chest, drowning out the memories with his steady heartbeat, a wordless reminder of him still being alive. “Hongbin knows how to use a gun,” Taekwoon replies, tucking both the guns, one with the magazine inside, the other separated, into his coat. “I taught him how.”

Wonsik raises his eyebrows at that. “Do you think he’d shoot you, then?”

Taekwoon doesn’t hesitate to answer. “Yes.” After all, Hongbin was always the one between them who wanted all the flashy tools, and thought it was a pity to let them sit, unused, while Taekwoon slunk in the shadows. All for good cause in Taekwoon’s opinion. 

Because maybe one day, if Taekwoon loses himself to the flood of every dead man’s eyes he’d looked into and hadn’t bothered to close, and the chaste kisses of the Lee Hongbin of five years ago – _when_ Taekwoon would lose himself to that flood and Hongbin would be chillingly silent in the car the morning after Taekwoon smashed someone beyond recognition and flesh – he’d let Hongbin load the magazine into the teal gun. And then maybe with a _bang,_ and the kick, Hongbin would have to wash the blood off his hands by himself for once.

 

 

 

Hongbin, for all his reckless smiles, chocolate stains on the sides, and impatience, no matter how often Taekwoon claimed otherwise, was not a child. He knew how to swap license plates and change tires and hot-wire cars – all on account of working at his father’s car shop since he was fifteen – how to throw the police off their track and how to take care of himself though Taekwoon was stubborn and insisted his fussing onto him, which Hongbin gracefully accepted – also a sign of his adultness, much to Taekwoon’s disdain. 

The thing was, Hongbin was incredibly smart, smarter than Taekwoon was when he was his age. Too smart for their little hometown that Taekwoon can’t seem to let go of no matter how badly he used to want to escape it. Hongbin, on the other hand, hadn’t shared Taekwoon’s ambitions to leave. He’d had his life planned out pretty far ahead – keep working at his father’s car shop until he took it over, make a humble living with a humble wife and noisy kids, start smoking at twenty-five so he wouldn’t have to suffer from the boredom that was a life too long and stagnant. Taekwoon thought that was smart, except for the fact that he came back into Hongbin’s life and threw all his plans to shit, and to this day, Taekwoon’s not sure if this – he – was a Plan B to Hongbin or an unexpected pitch from left field that he decided to take.

Being smart, Taekwoon’s learned over the years, means that every little thing Hongbin does means something, and if he’s not looking carefully enough, Taekwoon’ll miss their implications. Hongbin has morals – avoiding his gaze the night after Taekwoon goes out of his way to excessively crush some man’s hand that ghosted the sunflower yellow curve of Hongbin’s cheek underneath a dim street light – a deep sense of righteousness that sometimes makes Taekwoon wonder whether Hongbin is only along for the ride to know that evil is alive in the world and that he could survive it. When he blubbers this to Hongbin one day, Taekwoon’s head burrowing into his chest, Hongbin tells him he’s being paranoid and that Taekwoon could never be evil, not to him.

Taekwoon has morals, too, and that’s why he leans against the hood of the truck sometimes, observing their old high school in the acute silence of the night, inundated in everything he’s done. It’s just that Hongbin doesn’t shovel figurative piles of sand over the holes he cracks into his heart with every person they – _Taekwoon_ – kill, the sand doing nothing to keep the tides out. Hongbin contemplates, and then moves on. Is smart like that. Has a faster recovery rate from the gruesome than Taekwoon, and that’s why Taekwoon thinks Hongbin was born to kill people and stare at their soulless bodies, quite unaffected.

So when Hongbin lifts the teal gun after Taekwoon hands it to him, unloaded, and for that fact is frustrated, closing his eyes and aiming it at Taekwoon’s face, maybe at that little heart sticker he stuck under his left eye, claiming it made him look pretty and Taekwoon had laughed at that – Taekwoon holds his breath for a brief second, wondering if this is how all those men would feel if they could see him stalking out of the darkness to where they’d stand with Hongbin in the light, before remembering there’s nothing inside it. Exhales.

“You’re a fucking child,” he laughs and he kind of wishes Hongbin would be, the child who accidently finds a gun in the house and discharges it without knowing, innocent. But he also kind of wishes he knew what Hongbin was thinking in that exact moment, in that smart brain of his, so Taekwoon would know if he – as he laughs with Taekwoon, accepting the kiss pressed against his dimpled cheek – loved him the same way Taekwoon did: afraid, with firm fingers that could stain him with the washed-off blood of the lives he’d taken before.

 

 

 

One October night, the ends of summer finally tying into fall, a cool wind whispering over the thin sheet that their toes peek out of, Taekwoon dreams that Hongbin kills him with that teal gun he gave him, the _pow_ leaving his lips drowned out by the blast. He wakes only after he’s seen a wide shot of Hongbin leaning over his dying body – blood blooming against his shirt, Hongbin smacking a piece of chewing gum between his teeth, staring, quite unaffected.

“Nightmare?” Taekwoon hears Hongbin ask once his eyes adjust to the still-dark of the motel room. Hongbin looks at him, an index finger holding his place in a yellowed paperback they found in one of the cars they’d stolen. It pisses Taekwoon off, for some reason. That he’s not possibly enough for Hongbin that he has to read that book, that his finger is in between the pages, ready to go back to the page he was on after expecting Taekwoon to echo a soft _yeah_ back at him and cuddle closer to his side before falling back asleep. 

He rips the book from Hongbin’s hand. Hongbin lets it go almost too easily, too easily pushed further down in the mattress, Taekwoon looming over him, breathing hard. He looks at Taekwoon, quite unaffected like he did in Taekwoon’s dream, and the night swells around them.

“Would you love me if I was dead?” Taekwoon says, voice thick in his throat. Hongbin’s eyes soften with an emotion akin to sympathy, but without pity.

He places a hand against the side of Taekwoon’s face, pinky tracing his jaw gently. “Of course I would.”

Taekwoon swallows shakily just as a breath catches in his throat and then he’s coughing, choking, and Hongbin’s supporting his trembling arms with his own steady ones, and then Taekwoon feels the tightness of being unable to breathe in his chest as a sob tears from his mouth, no matter how much he tries to shut his lips around it to keep it from erupting out. It’s the ugliest, loudest noise he’s ever heard himself make – deafening like the fatal gunshot of death, full of the last cries ripped out of every man he’s killed’s mouths, their hearts stilling before they could react. 

And Hongbin, pretty and smart and righteous Hongbin, just tilts them so he and Taekwoon are leaning on their sides on the musty hotel bed, facing each other, his fingers tight around Taekwoon’s right wrist so Taekwoon can feel the pulse of his own heart, still beating, still alive, still guilty – still in love with Hongbin and Hongbin still in love with him.

 

 

 

Hongbin kills his first person at twenty, when Taekwoon’s stamping out his cigarette in the darkness, waiting for the sign. 

Hongbin kills his first person at twenty, pulling that teal gun Taekwoon gave him out of the pocket of his long, black coat that was Taekwoon’s once, only conceded to Hongbin when the younger bothered him for it continuously, and with an affectionate laugh and another _you’re a fucking child,_ it was his. The gunshot rings out, distorting the night, and Taekwoon pauses before running out of the shadows, every motion a freeze frame tinted in either a two AM purple or hardly-visible grey. 

Hongbin kills his first person at twenty, the blood probably spattering on his – Taekwoon’s – old black coat. When he turns his head to look at Taekwoon, the other half of his face is covered with speckles of the man’s blood. Hongbin averts his gaze back down to the dead man that lies between them, quite unaffected. He leans over the still-bleeding body, the dark blood pooling into the cracks of the concrete, and rustles around, emerging with two hands painted merlot and a wallet and car keys with a small flashlight in the chain.

Hongbin kills his first person at twenty and reaches for Taekwoon, smearing the blood onto his palms, too, and his wrist, uncovered by the loose, paper-thin t-shirt he’s wearing despite the cold of the too-early morning. 

Taekwoon still hears the ring of the gunshot in his ears after what feels like an eternity when Hongbin finally speaks. “Are you afraid of me, hyung?” he asks, voice chillingly calm despite the dead body on the ground next to his feet. 

This is Hongbin, Lee Hongbin, the Hongbin with his sweet tooth that ate candy meals for dinner somedays, the Hongbin who had walked up to Taekwoon and sat beside him on the bleachers when they were fifteen and eighteen respectively, squinting at the hazy sun against the AstroTurf, the Hongbin that challenges _what does that make you?_ when Taekwoon tells him he’s fucked up, wanting to say it to anyone but himself. The Hongbin whose hands he washed the blood off of, lovingly and sorry because he was too close to the scene of crime. But this time, both of their hands are caked with the drying substance and the iron is thick in the air between them.

“No,” Taekwoon whispers. “Never.”

Hongbin steps over the body. He presses his forehead against Taekwoon’s, purposefully, sure. Every little thing meaning something. 

Sometimes, Taekwoon was distracted, and missed their little implications. But this time, without the flood threatening to spill over and drown him, with his hands just as dirty and red as Hongbin’s, he sees with a surprising focus underneath the sunflower yellow street lights and he sees what Hongbin has been trying to tell him this whole time.

“Me too,” Hongbin whispers back, lips just grazing Taekwoon’s. It makes him shiver. 

“ _Never._ ”

 

 

 

Taekwoon kills his thirty-first person at twenty-three. Call it a sick rite of passage, an accident, an anomaly compared to his previous two decades of life. 

Hongbin is looking at him once he gets back into the car. Licks a speckle of blood Taekwoon hadn’t yet scrubbed off the side of his face.

 

 

 

(Taekwoon calls it a rebirth.)


End file.
